American railroads were privately owned from the beginning, until passenger rail started dying off due to competition from airlines, when the US nationalized pa

American railroads were privately owned from the beginning, until passenger rail started dying off due to competition from airlines, when the US nationalized passenger rail. Freight rail is still private and owns the actual tracks, and passenger rail is even less important today outside of Acela, which would probably do even better than it does today if Amtrak were privatized and allowed to drop the legacy long-distance lines that only lose money in order to reinvest in Acela. AWS isn’t the highway system. It’s the railroad. Now, railroads aren’t all good. Farmers were once relieved that the railroad would buy all of their produce but ultimately grew resentful that the railroad had become the only cost-effective buyer and shipper and could dictate prices to them—this is the etymology of the term “railroaded”. And eventually with the interstate highway system, the railroads had to compete with trucking. And from that perspective, AWS isn’t even the railroad. It’s a trucking company. The railroad owns the tracks. AWS doesn’t own the tracks; they operate on the same highway that Azure and GCP use. If someone invents something better than AWS, people will invest in migrating to it; that’s how they ended up on AWS in the first place. Does that mean that the network connectivity should be a public utility? Maybe at the last mile (municipal broadband?) but the backbones seem to work fine as a competitive market, too. Did you know that the US was one of the only countries where radio was privatized when it was first invented? Most countries nationalized their radio airwaves and had the government control all the broadcasting. We do have the FCC to allocate spectrum but we also had a remarkably free market in broadcasting and, as a result, led the world in radio technology well into the 20th century. Even Britain was so committed to controlling the radio that as late as the 1960’s, the unmet demand for listening to rock music on the radio could only be met by pirate radio stations broadcasting from ships at sea.